Playwright: book, music and lyrics by Elizabeth Bagby
At: Sansculottes Theater Company at The Storefront, 66 E. Randolph St.
Phone: ( 312 ) 742-8497; $15
Runs through: Feb. 12
Attend the tale of—no, not Sweeney Todd, though comparisons are inevitable. The year is 1827, still early enough in the Industrial Revolution to flood the great manufacturing cities with unemployed agricultural workers searching for jobs. But if Edinburgh was 'Old Reekie' to some, it was the 'Athens of the North' to others—among its scholarly institutions, site of Britain's most advanced medical college. In those days before organ donors, however, cadavers for research were restricted to executed criminals—a situation giving rise to the de facto 'Resurrectionist' trade. For disenfranchised immigrants Burke and Hare, selling the dead—at a price equivalent to a week's wages—is economically expedient. But as the demand for fresh corpses grows, every living citizen becomes a potential source of income.
The parallels to present-day business practices are obvious. But though Stephen Sondheim and Elizabeth Bagby both recount the sorry fates of fundamentally good people driven by their cruel societies to commit atrocities, Bagby refuses to engage in simplistic Us-and-Them finger-pointing. If the college's chief surgeon is a bigot, he is nevertheless sincere in his conviction that his efforts will ultimately benefit humankind. And while his suppliers' initial enemy is poverty, their downfall is greed—an affliction attacking at all social levels.
Bagby's musical score emphasizes this proletariat sensibility, its guitar-based melodies borrowing more from broadside ballads than Broadway brass—indeed, two songs are set to poems by Robert Burns, and the plaintive 'Have You Seen This Child?' could serve as a benefit anthem for the Indigo Girls.
Under Terry Selucky's direction, a cast that is led by Christopher Prentice and Dan Kerr-Hobert as the body-snatching partners amplifies the progress of the leads' corruption ( in particular, William Burke, who reads prayers over the victims even as he drowns his own horror in whiskey ) . And if it's apparent who was hired for their singing and who for their acting, the support of a four-piece acoustical orchestra render all performances well up to professional standard.
Anyway, given the question of whether honest men and women can prevail in an inhumane world versus whether Mama Rose's daughters love her, which do YOU find the more intriguing? Don't miss this one before the end of its too-short run.